40 Years Ago, One Atari Game Quietly Broke New Ground
When was the first time Indiana Jones looked cool in a video game?
Today, we’re lucky to live in a time in which you can play what is arguably the best Indiana Jones video game ever made: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. To be clear, it’s not the first instant classic Indiana Jones video game, but when did Indiana Jones games become incredible? There’s a good argument for the 1992 game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but the truth is, one 1985 game had to get us to the point where the whip-cracking adventures of our favorite scruffy archaeologist seemed viable and, crucially, playable.
That game was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was released in 1985, one year after the film of the same name was in theaters. The Temple of Doom was developed by Atari Games and released, at first, exclusively as an arcade game. This was the third Indiana Jones game overall, following an at-home Atari version of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1982, and an original home computer adventure in 1984 called Indiana Jones and the Lost Kingdom. But those games might as well not exist relative to the history of Indy games. True, there’s always some novelty in navigating a stick figure with a hat and a whip, but the nostalgia around the first two Indy games is only dimly felt, and likely connected to novelty and not actual enjoyable memories of gameplay.
Indiana Jones with a “Sankara Stone” in the film version of The Temple of Doom.
But The Temple of Doom was different. As one of the earliest examples of digitized speech in video games, The Temple of Doom followed in the footsteps of the 1983 version of the Star Wars arcade game by adding familiar dialogue into the action. But the gameplay of Temple of Doom, combined with some Indiana Jones authenticity, is what made this game such a leap forward.
The concept of the game was simple: It’s toward the end of the movie, and you’re Indiana Jones, already trapped inside the titular Temple of Doom. You have three tasks, which consist of three main levels of the game. First, you have to rescue the captured children, second, you have to ride the rails in the mine cart, and finally, you have to defeat Mola Ram and nab the Sankara Stone.
Sadly, this means the game doesn’t feature a level with Indiana Jones in his white tux, escaping the Shanghai nightclub at the beginning of the movie, nor does it feature Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” as sung by Kate Capshaw. But it does mean the game keeps things simple and knows its audience. In an arcade game, kids don’t want to watch Indy slowly gather clues or get embroiled in a complicated situation involving poison and antidotes. Today, we can simulate those kinds of things with more long-form games like The Great Circle. But, in 1985, keeping The Temple of Doom strictly focused on the actual Temple of Doom was a stroke of genius.
This doesn’t mean The Temple of Doom was an easy game. Just bumping into certain enemies could cause you to lose one of Indy’s lives in the game, and defeating Mola Ram in the final level wasn’t exactly easy. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be. The whole point of an arcade game like this was to make it just doable enough to keep people playing, and just hard enough to slam those quarters into the slot.
The start screen for The Temple of Doom in 1985.
By 1987, The Temple of Doom was ported over home computers, including the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, and simultaneously became a bestseller. Arguably, the fact that the game had to keep people’s attention in the arcade is why it was also successful as a play-at-home game. Philosophically, despite the action-adventure aspect of Indiana Jones, the nature of these kinds of adventures is inherently a little bit cozy. Subsequent Indiana Jones games would lean into the puzzle/mystery aspect of the archeology adventures, which means that Temple of Doom seems slightly more generic in retrospect.
Crucially, though, without this game coming first, it's questionable whether or not the leap from film to video game would have seemed viable for the Indiana Jones franchise. The Temple of Doom may not be the best Indy game of all time, but at the time, in 1985, it was the first truly good Indy game, ever. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy famously said: “It’s not the years, it's the mileage.” And the mileage that the franchise got out of this version of The Temple of Doom remains impressive, four decades later.
